


Aluerat

by HakureiRyuu



Category: Final Fantasy XV, Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, this was always gonna be a tragedy, two photographers who kind of hate themselves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 13:59:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15220694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HakureiRyuu/pseuds/HakureiRyuu
Summary: "That's a cool picture."The blond boy about jumps out of his skin, and Max feels kind of bad for startling him. He does seem to be the jumpy sort, once Max actually takes in his appearance instead of honing right in on the digital camera in his hands - kind of scrawny, wide-eyed, hair sticking up in a way that seemed halfway to licking a spark plug and yet managed to keep a stylish, windswept sort of vibe. He's also dressed like a Hot Topic ad, completely at odds with youthful face -He's got even more freckles than me,Max thinks - and not at all at odds with the heavy bags under his peculiar blue eyes. The dude looks exhausted and just this side of desperate.





	Aluerat

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Ordinary World](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13859208) by [FrozenHearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrozenHearts/pseuds/FrozenHearts). 



> My girlfriend linked me to this crossover fic and uh... My hand slipped.

"That's a cool picture."

The blond boy about jumps out of his skin, and Max feels kind of bad for startling him. He does seem to be the jumpy sort, once Max actually takes in his appearance instead of honing right in on the digital camera in his hands - kind of scrawny, wide-eyed, hair sticking up in a way that seemed halfway to licking a spark plug and yet managed to keep a stylish, windswept sort of vibe. He's also dressed like a Hot Topic ad, completely at odds with youthful face - _He's got even more freckles than me_ , Max thinks - and not at all at odds with the heavy bags under his peculiar blue eyes. The dude looks exhausted and just this side of desperate.

 _He looks_ , Max thinks wearily, _about as awful as I feel._

Still, she could never say no to snooping around in someone else's portfolio. "Can I see?"

He blinks at her, like he's not sure why she's asking. "Uh... sure, I guess?" His hands curl around the device protectively. "They're pretty old, though," he hedges. "I don't have any recent ones."

Max looks at the boy's hands around his camera, sees how the knuckles are going white. It might be better to just leave him alone, if he's that nervous about parting with it, even for a moment. "Oh," she says, softly. "It's fine if you'd rather not. I'll just... yeah." And she turns and walks away before she can say anything else stupid.

She gets about three steps before she hears a quiet sniffling sound behind her. And... she can't.

 _Fuck it_ , she thinks. _Clearly I'm not the only one who needs someone to talk to._

With a little mental tug, one that barely hurts at all in comparison to the huge jump that got her here, Max rewinds.

"- don't have any recent ones," the boy finishes (again), and Max doesn't hesitate. With a pasted-on smile, she plonks herself onto the bench seat next to him, doing her best to seem approachable in spite of the fact that she has no idea what 'approachable' is even supposed to look like. Rather than jumping again at her sudden invasiveness, the guy takes the opportunity to eye Max's own camera bag.

She quirks an eyebrow at him. "Did you wanna see mine?"

He actually _blushes_. Visibly stammering, he gets out, "I-I mean, I'll show you mine if you'll s-show me yours!"

Max barks out a startled laugh, because - _Holy shit, someone even more awkward than me!_ She's still smiling (for real for a change) as she tears open the velcro case and reverently removes her battered old Poleroid. "Chloe would probably make some dirty joke to go along with that," she can't help snickering, and then holds her camera out to him. "Trade?"

He complies, and seems surprised by the lightness of the thin plastic when it hits his hand. Max doesn't blame him - the blond's camera is _heavy_ by comparison, a sturdy digital machine that looks a lot like a Canon SX420 but doesn't have a visible label. The flash is nothing to speak of, but there is a timer switch and a number of other options, and the viewfinder screen is _huge._

The image on it right now is the one that drew Max's eye. It's of another boy, probably the same age as the blond guy, with night-black hair and eyes that are almost identical to Chloe's. Max hones in on them, practically a camera lens herself. The eyes sparkle back at her, confident and smirking, and Max's breath catches.

She presses the camera's directional button and begins hungrily flicking through the other pictures. The boy clearly has a taste for landscapes, and even the ones with people in them have fairly broad views - the one of a group of women having tea seems to show them almost incidentally, for example. Much of the shot is taken up by the impressive machinery and pipeworks in the background, shadowed and hazy with steam. Another is of a small child and an elderly man, dwarfed in the depths of a magnificent topiary garden where streaks of sunlight spear through the leaves and hedges in perfect relief.

"The lighting in these is really good," Max says, genuinely impressed. Abruptly she reaches for her own bag and begins digging through it, adding, "I have a few pics in my bag if you want to see them," by way of explanation.

He nods, and she passes over a few faded Polaroids that got knocked out of her journal somewhere along the way. Not necessarily her _best_ work, but Max had always felt more comfortable sharing pictures she hadn't worked very hard on. There was a bit of a mental buffer for the inevitable criticisms, that way.

Still, she doesn't miss the way his eyes widen with awe at her shots, and it occurs to Max that maybe he'd be just as impressed with her close-ups as she is by his landscapes. Not that she has no landscapes of her own, but most of them are faux-artsy, unbearably pretentious shots of daily life... or at least knick-knacks meticulously arranged to _look_ like daily life.

("Max," Chloe said once, worlds and worlds ago, "you use a friggin _Polaroid_ , and don't show your shots to anyone. You don't take pictures to be pretentious, you take pictures because you look at boring everyday shit and think it's beautiful.")

The blond boy pauses on a shot of Chloe, her expression almost identical to that of the black-haired boy from his own camera, bright-eyed and grinning as she runs along the train tracks behind the junkyard. "That's Chloe," she finds herself saying, fondly. Then, after a beat, she remembers to add, "I'm Max, by the way."

"Prompto," says the blond.

Max sniggers a bit, and hopes that doesn't come off as teasing. "Weird name," she says, "but hella cool."

Prompto shifts over to another shot of Chloe, the one of her dancing to obnoxious music on top of her bed, smoking weed and barely clothed. "She looks cool," he says, then passes the stack back over to her and hefts her camera in his hands again. "This is a nice camera, too."

Max takes the pictures and puts them gently away, but isn't finished looking through the digital camera's archives. She passes a stunning image of natural stone arches hundreds of feet across. She passes huge yellow birds, flightless and strong, munching what looked like lettuce out of Prompto's hand. She passes a bespectacled man with deft hands chopping vegetables in the kitchen of an RV, and a tattooed man doing one-armed push-ups in front of a tent, and the same black-haired boy, wielding a fishing rod and looking absolutely _delighted_ over his catch, which was almost as long as he was tall.

"Noctis pretended he hated pictures," Prompto says, gesturing to that last one.

"He looks like he liked fishing," Max says, unnecessarily.

Prompto smiled crookedly. "Yeah," he says. "Didn't get to do it much, though. Too busy with princely duties to do the things he actually liked."

 _A prince, huh?_ If there is anything regal about this Noctis, this boy who reminds her so much of Chloe, then it has to be in the traits he shares with her - not so much leadership as _presence_ , a certain spark that makes all who know them want to follow them to the end of time.

Further photos show Noctis angry, perhaps at a father figure; Noctis sullen and avoidant, but clinging near to his comrades all the same; Noctis asleep in an overstuffed motel chair as thoroughly as if he is stoned. Max saw Chloe in every single one of them. But other pictures were stranger: Noctis at the feet of an earth-brown giant whose foot is poised to crush him like an ant; Noctis, sword raised against a spear-wielding woman in spiked black armor who appears to have leapt down from the very heavens; Noctis, his pale hand inches from something radiant and white and throwing off pinkish lightning reflected in his eyes.

Noctis, caught in the act of leaping forward so powerfully that he left a crystaline blue afterimage of himself behind.

That one was more like Max, at least, although moving through space is merely a side-effect of moving through time. She wonders if Noctis has ever unraveled the thread of the past before, if he has ever hated one ending so much that he went back to demand a different one.

Max feels a leaden weight turn over in her stomach, and wordlessly passes the camera back. She doesn't want to look at Noctis anymore.

Christ, how did she even get to this point? Arcadia Bay was _gone_ , but she kept pushing, kept trying to find a way through. Then Oregon was gone, and probably the rest of planet fucking Earth from the look of things. Now she is in a reality where cell phones and cars exist in the same place as swords and demons.

"I don't know anything about this place," she says, half to herself. Prompto looks at her, confused, but she doesn't stop, only pinches the bridge of her nose. At least it isn't bleeding anymore. "I think I jumped too far, or too soon, or... Hell, maybe I stepped on an ant in the prehistoric era and now humans evolved simultaneously with electric cheetahs and fucking anteater wolves! I just wanted Chloe back, but if this is the wrong friggin' reality then I don't know _what_ to do from here -"

"H-Hold on," Prompto interrupts, staring at her intently. "What do you mean?"

And, _god_ she wants to unload. She wants so much to rip out the _guilt_ grinding in her chest and never look back. But _back_ is the only place where Chloe still exists, and looking forward isn't worth a damn to Max without her.

It hardly helps that, if she really did do something to branch this universe off from her own, everything Prompto went through, everything he lost, is also Max's fault at some level. No one knows that but her, though. Well, Chloe knew, but never once blamed her for it. Not even when Max told Chloe how her father died.

("You're faced with impossible choices, all the time," Chloe said as they laid in bed together, watching cigarette smoke form shapes on the ceiling in the dim morning light. "When you play god, you're gonna have some godly fuck-ups. But there's no one I'd trust with that power more than you, Supermax.")

Max doesn't trust herself with this power. But she's the one who has it anyway.

She looks Prompto, who now holds one camera in each hand, but doesn't seem aware of them anymore. And Max thinks, for the first time, that maybe he has a right to know just who to blame.

So she tells him. Everything.

And blame is not at all what he hears.

"You can bring Noctis back," Prompto says. It's not a question, it's not even a request.

She swallows, hard. "No," she says. "I can't."

" _Why not?_ "

Max can hardly stand to look at him, at the flickering hope and endless despair written all over his face. He's given back her camera now, shoved it into her hands with simultaneous haste and gravitas as though it were both precious and deadly.

It is. Because if Noctis is dead, and she tries to bring him back, it will just be Arcadia Bay all over again. One life exchanged for another, or ten, or thousands. "I don't know enough about how it works," she tries to explain. In a whisper, barely making it around the lump in her throat, she adds, "And I already killed Kate..."

"Kate?"

"A friend of mine. _It was an accident_ ," she blurts, swiping angrily at her eyes. "She jumped off the roof. I went back in time to prevent it, but I was too late."

Too late. All the time in the world, and she dared make _that_ excuse. Kate didn't need to die. But Max had made so many changes, so many rips and jumps and patches that causality itself was unraveling around her. She honestly doesn't know why she keeps trying, apart from some innate human stubbornness that insists _this_ time, _this time it will work._

This world has it hard enough as it is; whatever ripple effects would result from saving someone as important as a _prince_ would surely rip it apart at the seams.

(Part of her wonders how much worse it could even get at this point, here in this world of eternal night where a fraction of humanity barely clings to life in the light of a single city. Surely the only way to go from here is up, if she would only _try._

Another part of her, the much more selfish part - the part she always listens to in the end, no matter how much she hates herself after - says that her attempts to save Chloe had already flattened cities, killed thousands, brought the entire spacetime continuum to the brink of collapse. She keeps going because she doesn't know how to stop, but the goal is still _real_ to her. It encompasses her entire being. She has no room in her heart left for anyone else.)

Prompto looks like he's about to cry. Max stands up. She hates this, she _hates_ this. She doesn't want to look at him, but she does anyway, because - because she must. Two photographers in mourning, struggling in vain to keep hold of all they hold dear. Prompto is losing his entire world to the darkness. Max's entire world is one trash-talking teenager whom she cannot, _cannot_ leave behind again. Not at any cost.

She takes a few steps back. Prompto stares at her, clutching his camera like it's the only thing left in the world.

Max knows the feeling.

"I'm sorry," she says, and yanks herself away, back into the chaos she has already made of the timestream, and cries until she has nothing left.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted a complement to "Ordinary World", so I put "extraordinary times" in a Latin translator and it gave me "aluerat". That seemed odd so I ran the translation backwards and got "molded". Weird, but the only other option was "incredibili temporis" and what is even the POINT of Latin names if you can infer the translation right off the bat? (Lookin' at _you,_ Mr. _Scientia._ -huffs-)


End file.
